It’s not Easter in Old East Dallas until the Vikings and pirates come out.

They’ll be cruising down Newell Avenue alongside the more traditional bunnies and chicks on Sunday in the Hollywood Heights/Santa Monica neighborhood’s quirky Newellian Easter Parade, now in its ninth year.

“The thing unique about it is we really don’t have rules; it’s really about creativity and doing what you want to do,” said Liz Simmons, who started the parade. “It’s kind of insane, in a good way.”

Simmons is naturally adept at creating wonderment for the community of Tudor-style homes. She spends weeks each winter preparing her house and yard with thousands of lights and decorations that are unveiled before Christmas to the delight of families across North Texas. But this time of year, her attention turns to the parade.

Wooden bunnies, each with its own carefully crafted personality, dot neighborhood lawns. For $50, residents can rent them for the month to help pay for the festivities. On Good Friday, the seven-member “Bunny Board,” which organizes the parade, moves the bunnies to line the parade route.

Kinky Friedman will serve as the parade’s first grand marshal. Friedman, who is running for state agriculture commissioner, will, appropriately, be surrounded by people dressed as farm animals.

“I may be the first Jew to be the grand marshal of an Easter parade,” said Friedman, who is taking his duties very seriously. A former pageant queen advised him to use Vaseline for a constant, natural smile.

“It’s a very important position that the parade folks have given me here. I will do my best to fulfill all my responsibilities.”

A camping-themed float will feature taxidermy animals, Claudine the bear and Colleen the coyote. A group sitting around a campfire will match up against a swarm of human mosquitoes.

“It’s performance art,” Simmons said.

There’s a vintage firetruck, a Clydesdale-drawn carriage and the J.L. Long Middle School marching band, plus a lot of normal Easter stuff too, Simmons said, such as little girls dressed as bunnies and candy throws.

For the entry fee of two dozen candy-filled plastic eggs — which are used in a neighborhood egg hunt — residents can create their own floats to roll down the street.

For weeks, Carrie Funderburk’s two teenage sons, Camren and Dixon, and a handful of other kids, have been working on a battleship float.

It’s all about the community, said Funderburk, who has lived in the neighborhood for 20 years and served on the Bunny Board since its inception in 2005. Her mother, Barbara Draughon, makes adult-sized bunny costumes for the board members.

“The boys remember the first float they made, and they’ve been on a float every single year. It’s the most important thing to them,” Funderburk said.

Not everyone loves the quirky parade, but maybe they just don’t understand it, Funderburk said.

“They think it’s supposed to be all about the Easter bunny, but it’s really more just a neighborhood parade that just happens to be on Easter.”

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